The most important step to virtualisation is planning, say VMWare execs.
"The planning phase is 99% of the effort needed to virtualise," maintains Niall Kritzinger, territory manager for VMware, Southern Africa.
Chris Norton, regional manager for VMware Southern Africa, says a company needs to evaluate its readiness with a capacity planning tool and use the findings to "plan and engage a qualified and certified partner to help with a pilot".
In the clouds
<B>ITWeb</B> <B>Virtualisation of the Enterprise</B>
More information about the ITWeb Virtualisation of the Enterprise conference, which takes place on 16 July 2008 at Gallagher Estate in Midrand, is available online here.
Norton says virtualisation is a practice that "exploded" into the industry and he outlines a number of trends in the virtualisation space at the moment. "There is a move towards the Gartner Real Time Infrastructure model or, as some people might know it, 'cloud computing'."
He also mentions the interest around the technologies enabling virtual machine management and process automation.
Norton does explain, however, that there is still a way to go before realising the full potential of the current virtualisation tools. "There are some fundamental steps required between where we are today and where that nirvana resides in the realm of capability from today's generally available technology."
Aggressively virtual
Kritzinger explains that many people are not keen on virtualisation because of an innate resistance to change, and fear of the unknown. "The majority of people take the philosophy that if it seems too good to be true it usually is."
This, coupled with the general misunderstanding that "the rule books for costing models are re-written when virtualising", are the reasons that some companies do not aggressively implement virtualisation.
However, according to Kritzinger, an aggressive strategy could speed up ROI. "ROI within a virtualised environment is dependant on the aggressiveness with which you adopt a virtualisation strategy and can greatly differ from customer to customer. We've seen some customers with an ROI of 12 months and other customers realise a return within three months."
Both Kritzinger and Norton will be speaking at ITWeb's Virtualisation of the Enterprise conference in July.
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